Interactions - November/December 2012

everyone (especially those not in the luckiest billion) regards the world as a sweet place anyway. To most cultures throughout history, the world was understood as the source of intimidating distances, danger, disease, or drought. Even so, it was never so far from everyday experience. Only in the past hundred years did so much of humanity move indoors full time.

But there is more to this than stepping outside for a mental-health break. (Of course you may want to do so sometime—stopping to smell the roses doesn’t make you a Luddite.) Cognition research has demonstrated the restorative power of quiet fascination with environments [ 19]. The keyword there is fascination. What makes this more than a mental-health break is neuroplasticity, the brain’s considerable (but sorry, not infinite) capacity to be changed by habitual, embodied, adaptive learning. Here it might help to be a Zen master or a neuroscientist to explain this, but somehow those neural pathways are both better evolved and more adaptable for habitual fascination than for nonstop casual entertainment. Especially fascination with the world. If you are fascinated enough with the city, and it has noise pollution under control, you don’t need any audio feed, and it may not occur to you to turn your own music on.

One word for ongoing perceptual habits is sensibility. You can acquire tastes and dispositions; life would be dreary if you never did so. As attention psychology pioneer William James once put it, “[M]y experience is what I agree to attend to” [ 20]. In the age of superabundance, you more or less have to take responsibility for your attention practices. Except now, one hundred years later, cognitive sci-

3. For two good contrasting trade press inquires into attention, see Maggie Jackson’s Distracted— The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age (2009), and Winifred Gallagher’s Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life (2009). 4. On history of early overload, search the work of Ann Blair or Geoff Nunberg. 5. On overload versus overconsumption, search the work of Linda Stone or Sherry Turkle. 6. Ophir, E., Nass, C., and Wagner, A. D. Cognitive control in media multitaskers. Proc. of the National Academy of Sciences 106, 33 (2009). 7. On switching costs and the fallacies of multitasking, search the work of David Meyer. 8. On embodied cognition, search the work of Andy Clark, Lou Barsalou, Anthony Chemero, or George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. 9. Clark, A. Being There: Putting Brain, Body and World Together Again. MI T Press, 1997. 10. On embodiment and activity theory, readers of this magazine might already know the work of Paul Dourish, or Victor Kapetelinin and Bonni Nardi. 11. On “information as a material,” see Mike Kuniavsky’s Smart Things (2011). 12. On sensemaking, search the work of Karl Weick. 13. Mitchell, M. Placing Words: Symbols, Space, and the City. MIT Press, 1995. 14. On a Lexis-Nexis word search of “smart cities” in world news media, two thirds of the ~1000 results from the last thirty years are from the last ten years. 15. On walkable urbanism, search the work of Chris Leinberger. 16. On social history of predigital urban information technology, search the work of Priscilla Ferguson or David Henkin. 17. Simmel, G. The metropolis and mental life. 1903. For interpretations of Simmel, search the work of David Frisby. 18. Keizer, G. The Unwanted Noise of Everything We Want. Public Affairs, 2010. Also noisestories.org 19. Kaplan, R. and Kaplan, S. The Experience of Nature: A Psychological Perspective. Cambridge University Press, 1989. The Kaplans are generally credited for the now widely-used expression “ effortless attention.” 20. James, W. Principles of Psychology, Vol 1. 1890, 402.

ence has explained how attention is not a matter of will, and especially not a matter of instantaneous choice. Much more is now known about the mix of voluntary and involuntary attention, about alertness or orientation beside execution, about engagement and flow, and about the meditative remembering of different body states. Attention is no mere spotlight. You cannot choose what you notice at the moment. But you can alter your habits. Much more is now known about the importance of adaptive learning. The more that those habits involve fascination with some aspects of the world instead of entertainment by tuning out, the less empty overconsumption or casual attention theft you may suffer. Sensibilities to surroundings don’t involve just roses, but also rooms, streets, and neighborhoods. Without those, you would be only more overloaded; there would be nothing left but your screens. It is worth remembering that the environment isn’t simply someplace else in a pristine state, devoid of technology; it is all around you. It is slowly being augmented, with good design and bad. This seems worth your attention. Let’s hope the temporary inconvenience of this essay has been so too.

ENDNOTES:

1. To consider attention itself, and especially attention to surroundings, I have long been mining the literature, as an amateur but in a persistent and organized way, and with the benefit of excellent research library databases that complement the open Net. A feature article such as this one simultaneously increases the need to make generalizations and decreases the space to cite their very many origins. Please accept a disclaimer that I do know where so many of these ideas have come from, and only their juxtaposition and editorial synthesis is my own. For more detail, see my forthcoming Ambient Commons (Spring 2013, MI T Press). For these few endnotes here, please accept a limited number in abbreviated form. 2. Simon, H. Designing organizations for an infor-mation-rich world. In Computers, Communication, and the Public Interest. Martin Greenberger, ed. Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1971.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Malcolm McCullough teaches architecture at Taubman College, the University of Michigan. He has recently completed a book on which this essay is based: Ambient Commons–Attention in the

Age of Embodied Information (forthcoming, MIT Press, Spring 2013). He is also the author of Digital Ground (2004) and Abstracting Craft (1996), two other books on design and embodiment that have been widely read in the interaction design discipline.